New chapter: “Invisible, Dispersed and Connected: The Cultural Plausibility of Subtle-Body Models in the Contemporary West.” In G. Samuel and J. Johnston (eds), Religion and the Subtle Body in Asia and the West: Between Mind and Body, London: Routledge

New article (with P. Whitton):"’All my relos’: Aunty June Barker speaks of her family history". The Journal of the European Association of Studies on Australia. Vol.4. No.1.

New article:"We are survivors: a play by Puralia Jim Everett". The Journal of the European Association of Studies on Australia. Vol.4. No.1.

New article (with K. Burke):"My grandfather’s family secrets: unravelling layers of race and belonging in an Australian mixed-race family". The Journal of the European Association of Studies on Australia. Vol.4. No.1.

New article:"We are Survivors: the persistence of life and hope in Aboriginal marriage, family and kinship practices". The Journal of the European Association of Studies on Australia. Vol.4. No.1.

Dr Shé Mackenzie Hawke

New article: "Aquamater: A Genealogy of Water". Feminist Review; Special Edition on Water Vol. 103.

News and Events in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies

Tara Moss' book launch

31 March, 2014

Tara Moss, PhD Candidate in the department, has launched her new book The Fictional Woman, out May 22 with HarperCollins Australia.

The Fictional Woman is part memoir, part social commentary and very in keeping with my non-fiction writing of recent years. It draws on my lived experiences to enter a broader debate about the experiences of women and girls today, in the culture I know best, backed up (as always) with data. I make no claim of universality, but the stories will be relevant to many, I believe. In truth this is a book I’ve been storing up for decades, so when it came time to think about the cover, I at first struggled to imagine how the pages inside could possibly be represented. It wasn’t until I had finished years of writing and researching the book and had completed the first draft that the idea came:

My face. My fictions.

I chose labels or ‘fictions’ I had worn for some time – some worn willingly, others unwillingly, some complimentary and some negative, some absolute nonsense, many contradictory, but each label packed with its own baggage.

2015 News and events

Sara Ahmed on Feminism and Fragility

Sara Ahmed, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths, University of London, spoke about feminism and fragility at a public lecture organised by the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies on 25 March 2015. This lecture follows on from her wider concern with how bodies and worlds take shape, and how power is secured and challenged in everyday life worlds as well as institutional cultures.

The abstract for her lecture was as follows:"In this paper I think about how we can generate feminist theory from everyday experiences of being a feminist. In particular, I show how we can make "sweaty concepts," from a struggle to be in a world that does not accommodate our being. The lecture will reflect on the implications for feminism of how some of the experiences that make us fragile or "more easily breakable" are those that bring us to feminism. It will also explore how willfulness comes up in scenes of breakage, showing how fragility can be a way of connecting objects, bodies, and communities".

Dr Jessica Kean responded to Sara.

An edited version of the lecture is available to download here.Edit provided by Canvas on FBI 94.5FM.

The Department welcomes the ALLY Network

As part of its commitment to creating a stronger and more inclusive community, the University of Sydney established an ALLY Network to support the inclusion of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Queer (LGBTIQ) students and staff. The University has partnered with Pride in Diversity, Australia's first and only not-for-profit workplace program designed specifically to assist with LGBTIQ inclusion, to assist with the ALLY Network.

The Department of Gender and Cultural Studies was a strong presence at the launch of the ALLY Network on 3 March 2015 in the Great Hall, the Quadrangle. The Hon Michael Kirby AC CMG spoke of his time at Sydney. Professor Elspeth Probyn was an invited speaker, talking her own experiences of queer issues at the University. Other students and staff, and alumni were also invited as inaugural members of the Network. You can read Elspeth's speech here.

2014 News and events

New publication: The Australian Country Girl: History, Image, Experience by Catherine Driscoll

The Australian Country Girl: History, Image, Experience offers a detailed analysis of the experience and the image of Australian country girlhood. In Australia, 'country girl' names a field of experiences and life-stories by girls and women who have grown up outside of the demographically dominant urban centres. But it also names a set of ideas about Australia that is surprisingly consistent across the long twentieth century despite also working as an index of changing times.

For a long period in Australian history, well before Federation and long after it, public and popular culture openly equated 'Australian character' with rural life. This image of Australian-ness sometimes went by the name of the 'bush man', now a staple of Australian history. This has been counterbalanced post World War II and increased immigration, by an image of sophisticated Australian modernity located in multicultural cities. These images of Australia balance rather than contradict one another in many ways and the more cosmopolitan image of Australia is often in dialogue with that preceding image of 'the bush'.

This book does not offer a corrective to the story of Australian national identity but rather a fresh perspective on this history and a new focus on the ever-changing experience of Australian rural life. It argues that the country girl has not only been a long-standing counterpart to the Australian bush man she has, more importantly, figured as a point of dialogue between the country and the city for popular culture and for public sphere narratives about Australian society and identity.

Ruth Barcan wins Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Teaching

Ruth Barcan has been awarded a 2014 Vice Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Teaching. This is a wonderful achievement and highly deserved, reflecting the extraordinary care and skill with which she approaches her undergraduate and graduate teaching, and demonstrating the kind of reflective, practice-based approach characteristic of the best kind of teaching.

A fantastic achievement that reflects Ruth's outstanding teaching but also a tremendous honour for the department to have her here with us.

In the media: Dr Prudence Black for Hindsight

Australia famously rode to prosperity on the sheep’s back. Wool was our main export commodity from 1871 to the 1960s. For over a century, the golden fleece drew pastoral workers and professionals to regional Australia, and sustained many a country town. From the 1960s, new challenges faced an old industry: competition from synthetics, rising costs and waning prices on the international market.

But the Australian wool industry had some exceptionally determined advocates in the ranks of government and agri-politics who forced through a protectionist scheme in 1972. The Australian wool reserve price scheme remained in place until February 1991 when it was buried under a stockpile of wool so massive, it threatened to overwhelm the entire Australian economy. In the 23 years since the collapse of the reserve price scheme, the wool industry has shrunk to a third the size it used to be.

Just how much this decline can be put down to government and statutory intervention in market forces is a key question explored in this rich work of social, political and economic history. 'Bleat!' probes the old Australian fault line between free trade and protectionism, throwing into sharp contrast the material realities and economic policies of the Menzies/McEwen and Hawke/Keating governments. It takes us from sheep country in southwest Queensland, to the euphoria and hubris of the Bicentennial Wool Parade at the Sydney Opera House, and ultimately to the highest echelons of the Hawke government to find out how Australia fell off the sheep’s back.

Prudence is also working on 'Dressing Women for Work: The Role of Support Services in Reintegrating Inmates in NSW Correctional Centres' with Associate Professor Diane van den Broek, Work and Organisational Studies.

It has been well documented that getting women offenders into the workforce is an important way to reintegrate women into the community and contribute to the reduction of recidivism among this population. 'Dressing Women for Work' considers the importance of services that help female inmates prepare for court appearances and life outside gaol. The study analyses the effectiveness of programs such as Dress for Success, which already operates in several NSW correctional centres and transitional centres, and the way the service assists female inmates to think about dress and presentation as a way to build confidence and self efficacy as part of the process of reintegrating into society and the workforce.

New publication: Darwin by Tess Lea

Darwin is a survivor, you have to give it that. Razed to the ground four times in its short history, it has picked itself up out of the debris to not only rebuild but grow. Darwin has known catastrophes and resurrections; it has endured misconceived projects and birthed visionaries. To know Darwin, to know its soul, you have to listen to it, soak in it, taste it.

To write about her home town, Tess Lea waded knee-deep in memories of the city, including those of her family and her own. The story begins in 1974, when Cyclone Tracy shattered Darwin, and Lea was a little girl. Then it takes us back to the wild times of early settlement, explores the backstory of the White Australia policy, paints a vivid picture of the bombing of Darwin during World War II – the first Australian city to experience direct attack from a foreign power – and guides us to Australia’s militarised future, led by Darwin, sitting as it does under the largest aerial defence training space in the world. Lyrical and visceral, Tess Lea’s ode to her hometown is suffused with the textures, colours, scents and the many gritty realities that beset this tough, fragile, magical, foolhardy and unique place.

New co-edited collection: Modernism and Masculinity

Natalya Lusty's new co-edited collection (with Julian Murphet), Modernism and Masculinity, investigates the varied dimensions and manifestations of masculinity in the modernist period. Thirteen essays from leading scholars reframe critical trends in modernist studies by examining distinctive features of modernist literary and cultural work through the lens of masculinity and male privilege. The volume attends to masculinity as an unstable horizon of gendered ideologies, subjectivities and representational practices, allowing for fresh interdisciplinary treatments of celebrated and lesser-known authors, artists and theorists such as D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Henry Roth, Theodor Adorno and Paul Robeson as well as modernist avant-garde movements such as vorticism, surrealism and futurism. As diverse as the masculinities that were played out across the early twentieth century, the approaches and arguments featured in this collection will appeal especially to scholars and students of modernist literature and culture, gender studies and English literature more broadly.

Gender and Cultural Studies invited speakers

Dr Prudence Black has been invited as guest lecturer on "Modes of Existence: Thinking Fashion and Dress" at the summer school course at The American University in Paris, June 2014. She is also invited guest at "The Speed of Decolonisation: Travel, Modernisation and the 1955 Bandung Conference" at Postcolonial Justice Symposium at the University of Potsdam, May to June 2014. Dr Black also presented her invited paper "“I’m so Excited”: Flight Attendant Fashion, Films and Performance 1933 to 2013" at the Ist International Cabin Crew Congress, Estoril, Portugal, February 2014.

Dr Shé Hawke, Honorary Associate of the department, presented her paper "Reading Water Futures Through Resilience Thinking, the Biosocial and CAS theory" at the Research School of Social Sciences Seminar Series at the Australian National University, February 2014.

Luan Lawrenson-Woods, one of the department's 2014 Master of Cultural Studies students, has been invited to present her paper "That's Why She Fell for the Leader of the Pack: the Myth of Individuality in a Teen Coffin Song" at Le Rock and L'Amour (Love & Rock Music) international conference in Montpellier, France, 16th-17 April 2014.

Paul Priday, another PhD candidate in the department, presented this paper at the inaugural Carat Lens Consuming Cultures Research Group seminar at The University of Sydney, 6 November 2013.

Associate Professor Kane Race was the invited Keynote Speaker, giving his paper “Complex Events: drug effects and emergent causality” at the Contemporary Drug Problems 2nd International Conference in Aarhus, Denmark, August 2013. He was also the Keynote speaker at 13th HIV and Related Diseases Social Research Conference, Sydney UNSW 2014, for his paper “Party ’n’ Play: online hook-up devices and the emergence of PNP practices among gay men”. Kane was also an invited participant in a workshop on “Sex, Health and the Technological Imagination”, organised by Mark Davis and Mary-Lou Rasmussen at Monash in November 2013.

New appointments

Dr Victoria Grieves has been appointed joint Co-ordinator, WUN Indigenous Research Network at the University of Sydney with Assoc. Prof Catriona Elder of SSPS.

2013 News and events

Recent publications: Dr Victoria Grieves

Editor with the assistance of Dr Martina Horakova. Special Issue:Aboriginal Marriage, Family and Kinship in Australia: the persistence of life and hope in colonial and neo-colonial contexts. Peer reviewed, online Journal of the European Association for the Study of Australia, Vol. 4. No. 1.

New book: Academic Life and Labour in the New University: Hope and Other Choices

Dr Ruth Barcan examines what does it mean to be an academic today. What kinds of experiences do students have, and how are they affected by what they learn? Why do so many students and their teachers feel like frauds? Can we learn to teach and research in ways that foster hope and deflate pretension? Academic Life and Labour in the New University: Hope and Other Choices addresses these big questions, discussing the challenges of teaching and researching in the contemporary university, the purpose of research and its fundamental value, and the role of the academy against the background of major changes to nature of the university itself.

Drawing on a range of international media sources, political discourse and many years’ professional experience, this volume explores approaches to teaching and research, with special emphasis on the importance of collegiality, intellectual honesty and courage. With attention to the intersection of large-scale institutional changes and intellectual shifts such as the rise of transdisciplinarity and the development of a pluralist curriculum, this book proposes the pursuit of more ethical, compassionate and critical forms of teaching and research. As such, it will be of interest not only to scholars of cultural studies and education, but to all those who care about the fate of the university as an institution, including young scholars seeking to join the academy.

Feminist Manifestos and the Shaping of Political Modernity in New York

Associate Professor Natalya Lusty has been awarded a Visiting Scholar position at the Centre for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University for the Fall Term 2013. While at the CSGS Natalya will be working on a new project on “Feminist Manifestos and the Shaping of Political Modernity.” This project will rethink the history of feminism through the genre of the manifesto and to examine how women used and transformed the manifesto at key moments of social and political crisis across first, second and third wave feminism.

Grant news in 2013

Associate Professor Catherine Driscoll, with Anna Hickey-Moody has been awarded the SOPHI Conference grant, University of Sydney, for her project Youth and Technology: Pleasure and Governance. Well done Catherine!

Teaching awards

Congratulations go to two PhD candidates in the department, who won the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Excellence in Teaching Awards for 2013.

Nancy Lee was awarded Excellence in Teaching (Practice).

Kerryn Drysdale received The Dean’s Citation for Excellence in Tutorials.

The Awards Panel received the highest number of applications for these awards since their inception, so well done to both Nancy and Kerryn.

GCS' international presence

The department's international presence continues to grow thanks to the work of our academic staff around the world.

Congratulations to Professor Elsepth Probyn for her news in 2013:

Awarded the Visiting Scholar position in Semester 1, 2013 in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam.

Co-authored a paper with Jodi Frawley, "Fish Tales: the role of cultural and social sciences in promoting human-fish sustainability" at Seafood Directions, the annual seafood convention, Port Lincoln.

Gave a paper "The taste of place: oysters and communities" at The Marine and Maritime Festival, University of Sydney.

Congratulations also to Associate Professor Kane Race for his following achievements this year:

Invited to give the keynote address at the Contemporary Drug Problems conference, held in Aarhus, Denmark in August 2013.

Invited as the 2013 SRC Social Driver Guest Speaker at the Canadian Association of HIV Research Annual Conference in Vancouver, May 2013.

Associate Professor Catherine Driscoll has been invited to give the following keynotes in 2013:

“Global Girlhood: Internationalising Teen Film” (12 July 2013). The Girl in Global Cinema Symposium. University College, London, UK. “Disciplines, Methods and Objects: The Problem of the Problem of Country Girlhood” (26 June 2013). UWS Postgraduate Research Conference. University of Western Sydney, Australia.

Convenor of the panel- "Embodied histories of Trauma: the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct (PFFP) and the Intergenerational Impacts on the Health and Wellbeing of Incarcerated Women and Children" with Bonney Djuric and Christina Green of the PFFP. Gender matters: Determining Women’s Health, 7th Annual Womens Health Conference, May.

Convenor of the invited panel –"Mirror images across the Pacific: Indigenous people, legacies of colonisation and emerging South to South dialogue between Australia and the Americas". Developed with Prof Abeyami Ortega UNAM, Mexico City. Also including Dr Vek Lewis, Dr Fernanda Penaloza and Mr Jim Everett. Paper: “’La bestia: …’ The Beast as a global phenomenon?: comparative existences in Australia and Mexico” Conference: New perspectives on Transpacific connections – The Americas and the South Pacific, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich 25-28 April.

Invited paper: “Paradigms of whiteness? Retta Dixon long of the Aborigines Inland Mission and the recruitment of White and Aboriginal women for the Lord”. Women and Missions Symposium, Griffith University and the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Parliament House, Brisbane, March.

New book: Dreams and Modernity: A Cultural History

Associate Professor Natalya Lusty, with co-author Helen Groth, explores the dream as a distinctively modern object of inquiry and as a fundamental aspect of identity and culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

While dreams have been a sustained object of fascination from the ancient world to the present, what sets this period apart is the unprecedented interest in dream writing and interpretation in the psychological sciences, and the migration of these ideas into a wide range of cultural disciplines and practices. This books examines how the intensification and cross-fertilization of ideas about dreams in this period became a catalyst for new kinds of networks of knowledge across aesthetic, psychological, philosophical and vernacular domains. In uncovering a complex and diverse archive, Dreams and Modernity: A Cultural History reveals how the explosion of interest in dreams informed the psychic, imaginative and intimate life of the modern subject.

In an insightful interview with Routledge, showcased on the Cultural Studies page, Natalya Lusty and Helen Groth discuss their vision for the book and their aim to 'resituate the dream as a distinctively modern object of inquiry'.

New positions

Congratulations to Professor Elspeth Probyn for her appointment to the roles of Director, Carat Consuming Cultures Research Group, and Member of the executive for Sydney Environmental Institute and Node Convenor, Mariculture Environmental Research (MER)

And congratulations too, to Associate Professor Catherine Driscoll for her election to Chair of the Consortium fo Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Institutions.

Vicki Grieves has been invited to be a member of the International Advisory Committee, Humboldt Forum, Berlin GDR and will be a Thinker in Residence at the Institute of Koorie Education (IKE), Deakin University. She is also an invited member, Arts NSW History and Museums funding policy panel in April 2013.

Congratulations all!

2012 News and events

News in grant awards

The department is again well-represented in Australian Research Council (ARC) awards this year.

Associate Professor Kane Race received an ARC Discovery grant, commencing in 2012, for his project Changing Spaces of HIV Prevention: a cultural analysis of transformations in sexual sociability among gay men.

Dr Vicki Grieves has been awarded an ARC Discovery Indigenous grant, 2012-2015, for her project More than Family History: Gender, Race and the Aboriginal family in Australian History.

Associate Professor Catherine Driscoll, with Carrie Rentschler, Claudia Mitchell, and Marnina Gonick received the Social Science and Humanities Research Council Connection Grant (Canada), for their project Girlhood Studies and the Politics of Place: New Paradigms of Research.

Announcing the CSAA2012 Conference

The Department hosted the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Annual conference in December 2012. The theme was "Materiality: Economies, Empiricism, Things". For more information see this page.

2011 News and events

Honours thesis wins national prize

University of Sydney student Senthorun Sunil Raj has won the The Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives (ALGA) honours thesis prize in 2011. It was awarded for his work Moving Representations: Queer Refugee Subjectivities and the Law, which looked at the cases of nine people who’ve sought asylum in Australia on the basis of their sexuality since the mid-1990s.

Human-Animal Relations

Dr Fiona Probyn-Rapsey has taken on the roles of Coordinator and Executive Member of Sydney’s new Human Animal Research Network. HARN is an interdisciplinary and cross-Faculty research group. Enjoying a rapid growth within the Academy, both here and internationally, Human Animal Studies addresses and is inspired by everyday interactions with animals. From the perspectives of Science, Law, Veterinary Science and the Humanities, both the ‘animal’ and the ‘human’ carry different meanings and unique philosophical genealogies, and much can be learnt when these perspectives interact, consult, teach and learn from each other. HARN aims to promote cross-disciplinary dialogue within the university and between the university and community groups, international human animal studies organizations and other Australian University based organizations. HARN website

Mediating Beauty and Cosmetic Surgery in South Korea

Dr Jane Park is undertaking a research project Mediating Beauty and Cosmetic Surgery in South Korea funded by the Academy of Korean Studies in 2011 and 2012. Dr Park will be examining media representations of beauty culture in South Korea to consider how traditional, neo-Confucian notions of gender (especially of womanhood and femininity) are changing in response to globalization. In particular, the focus will be on the prominent role of cosmetic surgery as a mode of defining bodily aesthetic standards on- and off-screen. During her fieldwork in Seoul Dr Park will be looking into connections between the promotion of cosmetic surgery tour packages and the artistic decisions made by directors, producers and casting agents.

Affective Climates in the Big Apple

Dr Kane Race has been awarded a Visiting Scholar position at the Centre for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University for the Fall Term 2011. He will be working on the significance and mediation of 'affective climates' (Race 2010), as this concept might be applied to the health promotion principle of "constructing an enabling environment" in the context of stigmatized conditions such as HIV, homosexuality and drug use. In particular, Dr Race is investigating the performativity of the criminal law and enforcement practices in the context of disputes relating to the government of the night-time economy, as well as the legal and medical government of the global HIV/AIDS pandemic.

New book: Teen Film: A Critical Introduction

Arguing that teen film is always a story about becoming a citizen and a subject, Associate Professor Catherine Driscoll’s new book, Teen Film, presents a new history of the genre, surveys the existing body of scholarship, and introduces key critical tools for discussing teen film. Covering a wide range of films including The Wild One, Heathers, Akira and Donnie Darko, the book's central focus is on what kind of adolescence teen film represents, and on teen film's capacity to produce new and influential images of adolescence.

New Book: Mediating Faiths

In Mediating Faiths co-edited by Dr Guy Redden and Dr Michael Bailey (Essex) contributors illustrate how religion continues to be responsive to the very latest social and cultural developments in the environments in which it exists. The book raises fundamental questions concerning new media and religious expression, religious youth cultures, the links between spirituality, personal development and consumer culture, and contemporary intersections of religion, identity and politics. Together the chapters demonstrate how belief in the superempirical is negotiated relative to secular concerns in the twenty-first century.

Sexuality and Space Working Group

The Department’s Sexuality and Space Working Group worked with New Mardi Gras to host several events at Queer Thinking, an event held at the Seymour Centre to launch the Mardi Gras festival in February 2011. These included a panel on Sexuality & Race Online, chaired by Kane Race, and featuring the work of GCS alumni such as Senthorun Raj and Gilbert Caluya, and a keynote presentation by Professor Lauren Berlant from the University of Chicago, chaired by Melissa Gregg, titled Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin. Professor Berlant also ran a workshop for GCS postgraduates as part of her visit. These activities were made possible by Strategic Development Funding from SOPHI for the Sexuality & Space Working Group.